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Steve Jobs is widely regarded as one of the best business executive our generation had seen, genius even. While he does have an interesting character, I think there is a lot more to gain from his unique business experiences. These below are my interpretations of the book and what I've learnt. While Ben Golub's emphasis is on Steve's personality,' '''I'll be focusing on the '''business lessons and insights'. I won't be covering what Ben has put down. 1. The Apple Marketing Philosophy by Markkula (page 111): .. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer; "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be preceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities." 2. Steve's style of convincing people is by showing them the overarching big picture, often times from a very''unique angle. Here's an example (page 162-163): One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. "'If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. '''Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture." 3. Steve is also a master of boiling down things to their bottom line, cutting straight to the issue. A few examples: *'"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"' Jobs said to Sculley (page 196-197). That was a checkmate for Sculley, he couldn't say no and soon after ditched Pepsi for Apple. Most people would be presenting data, facts, and money to Sculley to do the job, but not Steve. *To the dozen Mac OS versions (page 381): "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?" Said Steve during one of the product review meetings right after he took over Apple from Amelio Gil. At that time Apple was rife with shit products in its pipeline. 4. Even very seasoned businessmen and marketers like Sculley and Markkula can be very wrong in their fields of expertise (page 207-208). So he screened "1984" ad for the board at its December 1983 meeting. When the lights came back on in the boardroom, everyone was mute. Philip Schlein, the CEO of Macy's California, had his head on the table. Mike Markkula stared silently; at first it seemed he was overwhelmed by the power of the ad. Then he spoke: "Who wants to move to find a new agency?" Sculley recalled, "Most of them thought it was the worst commercial they had ever seen." Sculley himself got cold feet. He asked Chiat/Day to se;l off the two commercial spots -- one sixty seconds, the other thirty -- that they had purchased. ... ... "1984" ad was a sensation. That evening all three networks and fifty local stations aired news stories about the ad, giving it a viral life unprecedented in the pre-YouTube era. It would eventually be selected by both TV Guide and Advertising Age as the greatest commercial of all time. 5. Two polar opposite philosophies can both be equally right. In this case, it's Apple's closed and integrated system vs Microsoft's open licensing system (page 613-615). This led Jobs to decree that the Macintosh operating system would not be available for any other company's hardware. Microsoft pursued the opposite strategy, allowing its Windows operating system to be promiscuously licensed. That did not produce the most elegant computers, but it did lead to Microsoft's dominating the world of operating systems. After Apple's market share shrank to less than 5%, Microsoft's approach was declared the winner in the personal computer realm. In the longer run, however, there proved to be some advantages to Jobs's model. Even with a small market share, Apple was able to maintain a huge profit margin while other computer makers were commoditized. In 2010, for example, Apple had just 7% of the revenue in the personal computer market, but it grabbed 35% of the operating profit. More significantly, in the early 2000s Jobs's insistence on end-to-end integration gave Apple an advantage in developing a digital hub strategy, which allowed your desktop computer to link seamlessly with a variety of portable devices. ... ... The strategy worked. In May 2000 Apple's market value was one-twentieth that of Microsoft. In May 2010 Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world's most valuable technology company, and by September 2011 it was worth 70% more than Microsoft. 6. Apple's philosophies that are radically different to its competitors: *'Design drives engineering, not the opposite (page 388-389).' At most other companies, engineering tends to drive design. The engineers set forth their specifications and requirements, and the designers then come up with cases and shells that will accommodate them. For Jobs, the process tended to work the other way. In the early days of Apple, Jobs had approved the design of the case of the original macintosh, and the engineers had to make their boards and components fit.*'Deep collaboration, unlike Sony (page 454-455).' Why did Sony fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organised into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive. Jobs did not organise Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss- bottom line.*'In order to win on innovation, you must have a way to communicate to customers (page 416).' There were no tech stores in the mall, and Johnson explained why: The conventional wisdom was that a consumer, when making a major and infrequent purchase such as a computer, would be willing to drive to a less convenient location, where the rent would be cheaper. Jobs disagreed. Apple stores should be in malls and 'on Main Streets -- in areas with a lot of foot traffic, no matter how expensive. "We may not be able to get them to drive ten miles to check out our products, but we can get them to walk ten feet," he said. The Windows users, in particular, had to be ambushed: "if they're passing by, they will drop in out of curiosity, if we make it inviting enough, and once we get a chance to show them what we have, we will win."*'The guts to push the 'pause' or even the 'rewind' button (page 420).' Jobs liked to tell the story -- and he did so to his team that day -- about how everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect. He talked about doing it on ''Toy Story, when the character of Woody had evolved into being a jerk, and on a couple of occassions with the original Macintosh. "'If something isn't right, you can't just ignore it and say you'll fix it later," he said. "That's what other companies do."*'''Insistence on integrated end-to-end solution and closed system (see point 5). *'Passion to build great products, not make money (page 619).' My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. '7. On leadership & management (page 225-226, 404-405, and 616):' *But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. "It's too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players," he recalled. "The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players." *"Under Steve Jobs, there's zero tolerance for not performing," Express' CEO said. At another point, when VLSI Technology was having trouble delivering enough chips on time, Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were "fucking dickless assholes." The company ended up getting the chips to Apple on time,... *"My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it." 8. Erase "but" from your dictionary, because any statements uttered before the "but" won't be regarded as true (page 240). "There is no one who admires your brilliance and vision more than I do," Sculley began. He had uttered such flatteries before, but this time it was clear that there would be a brutal "but" punctuating the thought. And there was. "But this is really not going to work," he declared. The flatteries punctured by "buts" continued. "We have developed a great friendship with each other," he said, "but I have lost confidence in your ability to run the Macintosh division." 9. If you don't like what's been said, change the conversation. This example is from how Jobs handled the media in response of the "Antennagate" issue surrounding iPhone 4 (page 572-574): Jobs did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the problem by showing that Apple understood it and would try to make it right. Then he changed the framework of the discussion, saying that all cell phones had some problems. Later he told me that he had sounded a bit "too annoyed" at the event, but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was unemotional and straightforward. He captured it in four short, declarative sentences: "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy." ... ... Adams wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly emailed around) that marveled at how Jobs's "high ground maneuver" was destined to be studied as a new public relations standard."Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook," Adams wrote. "If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words." By proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable assertion. "If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won't work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But 'as soon as the context is changed to 'all smartphones have problems,' the humor opportunity is gone.'Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth." Final note: The book was a lot of fun and highly recommended. One of my favorite bits of the book is how Steve called incompetent people 'bozos